Saving Money by Shipping Overseas

A while back I wrote briefly about being given a gift certificate for Amazon in the UK rather than Canada. My wife made her first purchase on the certificate and, amazingly, the total cost was less than if we had ordered the items in Canada.

My wife bought some school books, clothing, and a runner’s water bottle for a total of £208.33, which the Bank of Canada currency converter says is equivalent to $336.93. This includes shipping (£18.36) and import fees (£19.36), but we didn’t have to pay the UK’s value-added tax (VAT).

The same order in Canada would have been $368.21, which includes GST on the books and the full HST on the other items, but no shipping charge for such a large order. In total, we saved about 8.5% by ordering from the UK instead of Canada.

This is definitely a case of YMMV, but the next time you place an order with Amazon it might pay to see what the order would cost if placed with Amazon (or some other company) in another country.

Comments

  1. Chris BAugust 9, 2011 at 8:33 PM

    I recently purchased a war documentary from the US amazon site (instead of the Canadian one). My purchase (including shipping and duty) came to around $50 US. The exact same item on amazon.ca was $75 before taxes/shipping.

    Just ridiculous.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael JamesAugust 9, 2011 at 8:39 PM

    @Chris: Your comment gave me an idea: Amazon arbitrage. Buy stuff in the US or UK and return it in Canada!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short Takes: InvestorLine’s HISAs, 24-Hour Trading, and more

I recently moved some cash into BMO InvestorLine’s high-interest savings accounts (HISAs) that are structured as mutual funds.  Their designations are BMT104, BMT109, and BMT114, and they purportedly pay 4.35% annual interest (which they can change whenever they like).  However, the way they report the monthly interest payments is so baffling that I wasn’t able to sort it out in my first 15 minutes of trying.  A further complication is the following text in the HISA description: “The Bank may pay, monthly or quarterly, compensation to your Dealer at an annual rate of up to 0.25% of the daily closing balance in the BMO HISA.”  I couldn’t find any evidence of such a charge, but I haven’t been invested for a full quarter, and I can’t yet say that such a charge isn’t buried somehow in the confusing reporting.  I have more digging to do before I can recommend these HISAs. Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Preet Banerjee explains the dangers of Robi...
Read more

My Asset Allocation

I’ve resisted discussing my asset allocation for some time, but now is finally the time to describe it and the reasons behind it. I’m not holding it out as a model portfolio; I believe it’s suitable for me and not necessarily anyone else. With that warning, enjoy the discussion and feel free to ask questions or take some pot-shots. The main reason why I haven’t discussed my asset allocation in detail before now is that I don’t want readers to treat it like a model portfolio and follow it blindly. Everyone’s situation is different. The need for variation in asset allocation from one investor to the next usually isn’t huge, but there is no one-size-fits-all portfolio. A secondary reason for keeping my asset allocation to myself is that I can’t be sure I’ll never change it. For example, I recently made the minor change of switching from an ETF of small-cap stocks to an ETF of small-cap value stocks . I don’t have any plans to change my current allocation, but I may think differe...
Read more

What to Do About Crazy Stock Valuations

Image
The last time I had to put a lot of effort into thinking about my finances was back when I retired in mid-2017.  I had ideas of how to manage my money after retirement, but it wasn’t until a couple of years had gone by that I felt confident that my long-term plans would work for me.  I had my portfolio on autopilot, and my investing spreadsheet would email me if I needed to take some action. I was fortunate that I happened to retire into a huge bull market.  I got the upside of sequence-of-returns risk.  The downside risk is that stocks will plummet during your early retirement years, and your regular spending will dig deep into your portfolio.  Happily for me, I got the opposite result.  My family’s spending barely made a dent in the relentless rise of the stock market. However, stock prices have become crazy, particularly in the U.S.  One measure of stock priciness is Robert Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE) ratio .  In the U.S...
Read more

Archive

Show more